There is no overstating what Jared Gaither accomplished last December.

What Gaither did for five games almost saved a season, probably spared the health of a franchise quarterback and definitely salvaged the tremendous promise of his own career.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a situation where a guy had as immediate an impact as Jared did over the last five weeks,” said Chargers Head Coach Norv Turner, who generally limits comparisons to situations in his three decades in the NFL.

The Chargers definitely saw Gaither as a sort of savior. He started five days after arriving in San Diego and went on to play five relatively flawless games as the main line of defense on Philip Rivers’ blind side.

Last week, due to that stretch of games and the fact that they were not willing to wager $10 million on Marcus McNeill, the Chargers essentially guaranteed Gaither $13.5 million on a four-year, $24.6 million contract.

That might well qualify as the biggest gamble the team as ever taken in General Manager A.J. Smith’s decade in charge of personnel decisions.

Gaither is too talented to have been running out of chances. He is too big and can move too well to not be in the NFL this summer, regardless of how he performed for the Chargers over the 2011 season’s final month.

But a false start and seemingly knee jerk reaction by the Kansas City Chiefs had him at a crossroads this past November.

Gaither won’t admit there was any desperation in his situation, but he recalled on Friday that he arrived in San Diego late last season intent on giving “everything I have -- leave no stone unturned and work hard.”

Later, as he rushed to the airport, Gaither acknowledged he had to prove himself but balked at the suggestion he had a reputation for being less than a hard worker.

What follows is a series of questions asked of and answered by the 6-foot-9, 340-pound Gaither as he stood outside Chargers Park fairly blocking out the sun.

Ever heard of Big Lazy?

“Used with who?”

You.

“Negative. You can’t be lazy in this league. I don’t understand where that question would even come from.”

No one is here to question the veracity of Gaither’s protests. (It was probably pushing the boundaries of common sense to even ask the giant man about it in the first place.) But, fact is, Big Lazy was a nickname used in reference to Gaither when he was in Baltimore.

Everyone knew about his reputation: So big, so talented. Such a disappointment.

Look, there was a time the Ravens wanted to give him a big contract to be their right tackle. But he hurt his back, was seen as less-than-enthusiastic about rehab and work in general and eventually was let go. He spent the first three-quarters of the 2011 season with Kansas City before being released two days after committing a crucial false start penalty on his first snap late in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The Chargers knew Marcus McNeill wasn’t coming back and Brandyn Dombrowski, try as he might, was not going to allow them to turn their season around. So they claimed Gaither off waivers, give him the playbook and hoped for the best.

Nothing more could be asked of him in is five games. He did not allow a sack. He was not even responsible for Philip Rivers being hit a single time and allowed just three pressures. He moved extremely well. He took the play to his opponent, worked a little bit angry.

“He did a lot of things off natural ability,” offensive line coach Hal Hunter said. “He was tough, aggressive, didn’t make a lot of mistakes. Not penalties, not a lot of busted assignments.”

Now Hunter will ask for more. And there’s the rub.

We won’t know until Gaither plays for a season – or more – whether he was playing to earn his next payday or to earn his teammates’ respect.

Hunter, who hails from not only the football rich soil of Pennsylvania but from football stock, his father a college and pro coach before him, believes the Gaither has proved himself worthy of trust.

Hunter said he told Gaither when he arrived that the player was starting over.

“Everything that has happened before this day does not exist,” Hunter said. “We are starting fresh as if either one of us don’t know anything about the other ... He showed us he was very receptive to coaching. Some guys aren’t coachable. He is. He works hard on the practice field and is very attentive in the meeting room. We have a culture in our room right now. He showed me he’d be able to follow that culture.”

It was impossible to ask Gaither to do much more than grasp the game plan each week in December. Beginning in offseason coaching sessions, Hunter has in mind some things he wants to refine in Gaither’s game.

The two met Friday morning, in fact, to go over some of those plans.

““I think we’re going to get the same guy we had those five weeks -- and more,” Hunter said. “If I didn’t really believe that, if we didn’t believe that, I don’t think he’d be here.”